NCJ Number
192365
Journal
Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report Issue: 104 Dated: Winter 2001 Pages: 6-15
Editor(s)
Mark Potok
Date Published
2001
Length
10 pages
Annotation
This article focuses on the problems of compiling hate crime statistics.
Abstract
One decade after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began collecting State hate crime statistics and publishing them under the Federal Hate Crime Statistics Act, the national effort to document hate-motivated crime is inadequate. A just-completed survey of the 50 States and the District of Columbia illustrates how the system, already hampered by the voluntary nature of reporting, is riddled with errors, failures to pass along information, misunderstanding of what constitutes a hate crime, and even outright falsification of data. While the published hate crime totals have been running recently at some 8,000 cases a year, the real figure is probably closer to 50,000. The gathering of hate crime statistics has been controversial--so much so that over one-third of police jurisdictions have opted not to participate in the effort. In some jurisdictions that have chosen to participate at the official level, opposition or indifference among personnel responsible for gathering the figures has compromised the effort and has discouraged already reluctant victims to come forward. Because hate crime categories are relatively new and vary among jurisdictions, even conscientious officials have had problems reporting accurately. Some of the concrete reasons for the failure of law enforcement agencies to report or for their errors in reporting are using false zeroes for reporting no hate crimes at all, or not reporting minor crimes that may lead to more serious crimes later. The FBI concedes false-zero reporting is widespread. Law enforcement jurisdictions in at least 10 States failed to report 1999 incidents that surely qualified as hate crimes. Criminologists say that minimizing or even ignoring such crimes is a grave mistake. Recommendations to remedy the situation are to improve police-community relationships and infrastructure and support, provide hate crime training, and improve data and reporting.